The Spanish violinist María Dueñas captivates her audience with her extraordinary range of timbres, her technical skill and her artistic maturity.

Her meteoric rise led to an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. After her debut album Beethoven and Beyond won an Opus Klassik award, she received two Gramophone Classical Music Awards in 2025 for her second album – an ambitious project centred on Paganini’s legendary 24 Caprices.

María Dueñas has already collaborated with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Münchner Philharmoniker, the Bamberger Symphoniker, the Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen, Pittsburgh Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Accademia di Santa Cecilia und the Orchestre de Paris. In doing so, she has performed with a host of highly esteemed conductors such as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Herbert Blomstedt, Christian Thielemann, Marin Alsop, Christoph Eschenbach, Manfred Honeck, Marek Janowski, Daniel Harding, Andris Nelsons, Alan Gilbert, Paavo Järvi, Kent Nagano, Andrés Orozco-Estrada and Santtu-Matias Rouvali.

Highlights of the 2025/2026 season included her debuts with Karina Canellakis and the Wiener Philharmoniker at the Salzburg Mozart Week and with Manfred Honeck and the New York Philharmonic, concerts to mark Zubin Mehta’s 90th birthday with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and a tour of Australia and New Zealand.

María Dueñas plays a 1779 Giambattista Guadagnini violin on loan from the Deutsche Stifung Musikleben as well as the 1718 ›Michelangelo‹ Stradivarius on generous loan from the Karolina Blaberg Stiftung.

Giedrė Šlekytė began her musical training at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art School in Vilnius. Lithuanian-born but now resident in Austria, she went on to study conducting at Graz University for Music and Performing Arts, the Leipzig College of Music and Theatre and Zurich University of the Arts. She also attended masterclasses with Bernhard Haitink and Riccardo Muti. In 2016, she was appointed Principal Conductor of the Stadt Theater Klagenfurt, where she conducted her first production – Mozart’s ›Entführung aus dem Serail‹. Further opera engagements have taken her to the Bayerische Staatsoper, Oper Zürich, Staatsoper Berlin, Lithuanian National Opera and the Semperoper Dresden.

For several years, Giedrė Šlekytė has been in great demand internationally as a guest conductor in both opera and concert settings. During the 2024/25 season, for example, she made her debut at the Wiener Staatsoper with ›La Bohème‹ and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London (›Hänsel und Gretel‹), she also returned to the Musik Theater an der Wien with a new production of ›Das Paradies und die Peri‹, and to the Berliner Staatsoper with ›The Pearl Fishers‹ and ›Le Sacre du Printemps‹. Her symphonic projects included debuts with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia London and the Tokyo NHK Symphony, as well as return engagements with the Münchner Philharmoniker and others. As early as November 2023, she stepped in at very short notice for Daniel Barenboim with the Staatskapelle Berlin and conducted the complete Brahms cycle in Toronto, marking her debut in Canada and North America. In the 2025/26 season, this conductor will once again take the podium with the L.A. Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, as well as with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra. From 2027/28, she will take up the position of Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, one of Europe’s leading orchestras.